Live Agelessly With Dr. Dian Griesel

Are you 50 years old, and you feel that life is setting on you? That is far from the truth because you can choose to live agelessly! Dr. Diane Hamilton’s guest today is Dr. Dian Griesel, the Founder and President of Dian Griesel International (DGI) and Silver Disobedience. Dr. Dian explains that you have to take responsibility for your life, own it, and be who you want to be, regardless of age. There’s no time in your life that you can’t live the life you’ve always wanted to live! All you need is a clear goal and the determination to pursue it. Dr. Dian herself is in her 60’s, and she’s still rocking her online presence through her various social media platforms! Who said baby boomers couldn’t learn how to use technology? Join in the conversation and be inspired to live agelessly!

 

We have Dr. Dian Griesel here. She is the Founder and President of Dian Griesel International, DGI, and Silver Disobedience. She’s also an author, model and so much more. It’s going to be so great to talk to her. 

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Live Agelessly With Dr. Dian Griesel 

I am here with Dr. Dian Griesel who is a perception analyst, nutritionist, bestselling author, founder and president of her own company and so much more. It’s so exciting to have you here. Welcome, Dian. 

Diane, I am excited to be with you. 

I was looking forward to this. You’re the second Dian I’ve had on the show, but you are the first spell it differently. I am always fascinated when I see it spelled differently. Is there a story behind that? 

When I was in 7th grade, I wanted to change my name altogether. The school that I was in wasn’t going for that, a local public elementary school. I started to spell Dian fifteen different ways, everything I could come up with. Finally, the school said, “She’s got to stop doing this.” My mother said, “Dian, spell your name any way you want. You can’t change it. You’re Dian for now but spell it any way you want.” 

Dyan Cannon’s got a new twist on it too. 

I was first Dyan. That’s what I did first. Somehow, I just changed it. I’ll probably never get Social Security. 

You bring up Social Security, which is a good lead into some of the stuff you deal with the silver generation. You have a company called Silver Disobedience, and you have so much more that you do in the over 50 crowd. I imagine you weren’t interested in the over 50 crowd when you were in the under 50 crowd. Give me a little background on all that. 

How it all started was we had two teenagers. When our younger one, a son, was skateboarding one day, he got cast in an Old Navy commercial. Long story short, the casting agent ended up casting me at 57 in a variety of commercials. I had been doing crisis management for twenty-plus years. It was a surprise to have these commercials going on. At any place I go, I find out who are the people that I’m speaking with, what they do. I try always to take their contact information. Out of the blue one day, one of the makeup artists sent me a note and said, “Wilhelmina is looking for a silver-haired model.” That was how it started. I couldn’t believe it. The morning of the meeting, when I was going to meet with Ginni Conquest who’s one of the head agents there for 35 years, my husband says to me, “Where are you going all dressed up?” I said, “To the shortest business meeting in the history of business meetings, but I’m going anyway.” 

You are exactly what she was probably looking for. You’re beautiful with your gray hair. Most people can’t have gray hair that looks like that. You’re very fortunate. It’s not just your hair though. You’re stunning. How was that meeting? I’m curious.

 

Half an hour later, I was walking out with a contract. I met a bunch of people. They said, “You’re going to go up on the main board.” I couldn’t believe it. They‘re the new group of women that they were starting in this older category. Most of the women had been models their whole lives. One of the parts of it was I was supposed to start an Instagram and Facebook page. I was mortified. I thought, “I kid my teenagers about taking pictures of themselves and posting them and now I’m supposed to do this.” All my clients would think, “She’s having a midlife crisis.” How can they take me seriously? I said, “I can’t just post a picture. I’ve been a writer my whole life. I’m going to accompany it with writing about what’s interesting to me.” How it started was, coupled with that, one of my children one time was sitting with a bunch of friends. Somebody in the conversation called someone else irrelevant. I remember walking over to the group of kids and saying, “I never want to hear that word in my house anymore ever. No one is irrelevant.” The conversation was like, “You don’t understand.” I’m like, “No, I do understand. I’m 40 years older than you. I get it. Don’t ever use that phrase.” My first blog post is, “Does aging make you irrelevant?” 2,500 people responded to that. 

Was it all over the board? 

It was all over the board. First, from the people who said, “I’m so glad you asked that question,“ to those who were flat out, “I felt nobody notices me. They notice my kids. They notice other people. They don’t notice me,“ to “Are you kidding? Life is rocking now. I‘m done working in the traditional way. I started a new business. I’m having fun.“ Some people are flat out retired. The comments were incredible. It inspired me to keep writing every day if I had to keep posting these pictures. I’m like, “I’ll post the picture if I have to, but I’m going to write.” It’s almost four years, I haven’t missed a day and I love the daily conversation. 

I’ve been doing this show for years. When I first started doing it, I thought this is going to be something fun to do. Now it’s 1,200 people or something that I’ve interviewed. You’d have no idea what you’re getting into sometimes, when you start something of what it’s going to roll into. You learned so much. 

What did you learn when you started your show? 

I was trying to build the platform a little bit. I was running the MBA program at Forbes School of Business. When I left, I decided to go back to speaking and consulting. I thought I could interview some people as part of Forbes stuff. They were interesting. It was the first time I’ve ever interviewed anybody and I thought, “That was fun.” When I put my website together, they go, “You need to get more content to show all your books in the past and different things.” I had someone interview me. He had a nationally syndicated radio show and I thought, “This is cool. How did you get this job?” I had come off of interviewing Ken Fisher, the billionaire behind Fisher Investments. I go right in big when I go. I thought, “This would be fun to do.” 

He said, “They have a spot, but you have to get it all done in two weeks and have four weeks of people ready.” I’m thinking, “That’ll be interesting.” I figured it out and did it. It was something I stumbled into, but I have met the most interesting people. I had no mission to use connection for anything. It’s been wonderful. Some people do these shows because they want to get a CEO or a head of a company to sell them something. I don’t do any of that. Whoever is interesting, I have them on the show. Since I write about curiosity and perception, I’m curious and I love to hear what everybody’s done. Yours was so unique to me. I have had a couple on that were looking at creating sites for over 50 crowds. It surprises me there’s not more for that’s good. Why is it so underrepresented? 

I think that’s changing. People have to choose to change it. The discussion has to be started. It can’t just be, “I don’t like how things are.” We have to speak up. The more people speak up and put their money where their mouth is and the demographics are huge in the older 50 audience. As you get all these Baby Boomers every single day, which is what I am one of, there are 114 million of us now over age 50. We hold 83% of household wealth. We generate 53% of consumer spending. Any smart marketer has to start to tune in, but it wasn’t always this way. 

It’s interesting the TV shows aren’t geared more that way. You would think if we’ve got all the money, you’d see more shows. It seems it’s aimed at more Millennial and younger stuff. They split between if you’re an older person, you watch NCIS, otherwise there are people swinging over water and getting on islands. I don’t know. 

Netflix is trying to zoom in. 

The Queen’s Gambit and stuff like that was great because it goes across different generations. I don’t see a lot of that. Things that have a lot more meat to it or substance, not so reality TV. I don’t know the demographics of who watches reality TV, but it doesn’t appeal to me. I’m surprised there’s not a little bit more of a focus there. I talked to my friend, Dr. Gilda Carle. She was big on Sally Jessy Raphael and all those. She’s a good friend of mine. We talk about this because she was so big in TV and still is. You have the Ellen shows and different things. It’s so hard now because everything’s on demand. Some of the over 50 crowd isn’t as good on computer on demand stuff as younger crowds. Some of it has to do with technology sometimes. When you got into this, your site is all aimed at the silver crowd, how do you reach them if a lot of them aren’t super computer savvy? 

That is one of the things I seek to dispute. I have a 92-year-old mother and her husband is 85. They’re both on computers. They’re both using iPhones. How many people do you know were still on dial up? 

None. 

[bctt tweet=”No one is irrelevant, but if you believe you are irrelevant, then you are. ” via=”no”] 

I’m not 50, I’m 60. I have a 70-year-old sister and my closest friend is 80. My mother is 92. We’re all on computers all day long or iPhone. 

My mom’s not very good on it. 

I’m glad I have an IT team, personally. 

I am the IT for my mother. Anybody who gives their mother computers at that age can end up being the IT. 

Computers and technology are constantly changing. There’s a big audience using it. My demographic for my blog ranges from pretty much 35. I’ve got 103-year-old that I know of, a lot of 80-year-olds and then a bunch in their mid-40s to mid-60s is probably the biggest group. 

On your books and things you offer, you have The Silver Disobedience Playbook, TurboCharged, you write a lot of different things. Is this all you on these articles or you have other people writing on your side? 

All of the Dian’s Daily Dose with any of the ones that include my picture, I’ve written. We then have people who contribute. We’ll do interviews with people which goes into other categories within the site, health, living and travel. We’d love to interview you. 

That would be fun. We’ll have to do that. I want to talk about your interest in perception. You have a PhD. What was your dissertation? 

It was in Nutrition. It’s none of my official schoolwork, except for the psychology work, which you do in general. Working as a perception analyst came from, I was getting hired over the years to buy publicly traded companies. The CEOs, well over 400 of them, would usually call me right at a crisis moment, a good crisis or a bad crisis. It would start out from the PR side working out how are we going to share this news, but I started to spend more time delving down or what were going to be the variety of perceptions people would have about the news, depending on how we said it? For a publicly traded company, you have many different audiences. You have your investors, partners, employees, shareholders, the regulators. When you’re putting out a message, you need to be cognizant of the perception that’s going to be garnered from all of those audiences. With the internet, they’re all going to see the same words. 

It’s fascinating how everybody can see the same words and yet they see different words. 

That blows me away almost daily. I spend so much time before I post an article, reading it, rereading it, because I don’t want to be judgmental. 

There’s so much that goes into it.

You know that as a speaker. We’re all on our journey. It’s not my job to tell you what to do. In 2020, with the election was challenging. Sometimes I would put a little disclaimer at the bottom, “In no way is this a political statement.” I believe it all has to be about focusing on ourselves in the most positive sense of the word. If we’re focusing on ourselves and we know how hard it is to drop a few pounds or remember to workout, walk, or not eat like crap 24/7, when we just want to because it looks good or we’re bored from sitting at a desk too long. When we realized how hard it is for ourselves to do that, we’re a little less critical of other people. 

It’s easy for people to be critical online now, which has made it hard. As we’re talking about perception, I teach a lot of marketing still. In my marketing classes, I’ll often bring up different ads and ask them what their perception is of that. Gillette for example, as I watched when that one rolled out, some men got very upset that it portrayed them in a negative light and others we’re finding it fine. It’s interesting to see how people are almost looking for the negative in some things. I don’t necessarily think Gillette was trying to be controversial with that in a bad way. Do you think that all publicity is good publicity? Does it end up as a good thing because it brought so much attention? What do you think about that? 

Are you talking about the Gillette campaign when all of a sudden, they were talking about the guys and they were almost apologizing for being men? I found that campaign horrifying. 

There are also a lot of people who didn’t find anything wrong with it at all, which is fascinating to see the differences. 

I have a daughter and I have a son. I don’t want my daughter feeling guilty for being a good-looking young lady. I don’t want my son feeling guilty because he wants to grab his girlfriend’s hand without asking for permission spontaneously. That’s an extreme of it. There are things were there are issues. There are also areas where we need to chill. 

If you have watched that before, you wouldn’t have let that one air. Is that what you’re saying? 

I would strongly discourage it. 

Do you think they go ahead and release these things for controversy because of any publicity is good publicity reasoning or do you think they just missed the boat with that? I’m curious of what you think since you’ve got a strong PR background. 

I don’t know. Sometimes people fall in love with their own work and aren’t self-reflective on what could be the perceptions of different audiences. When someone tells me anything they want to do, I say, “Let’s imagine writing the press release for this. What do you think the feedback will be based on what you thought was the message you wanted to get across? Who’s going to think this was wonderful or not?” 

That’s like any message. It’s the time where you have to analyze things much more in–depth than you ever did in the past. This has been the strangest time, not even before COVID, now we have COVID on top of it. How was that impacting your work now? Are you getting more people on your site? Are you doing more consulting? What are you doing now? Is it changing that? I have a lot of speakers and consultants that we’re getting hurt right now. Especially the speakers are getting a lot less money because people think you’re doing it virtually. Has that influenced anything with your work or were you always virtual? 

I was not always virtual. I had an office, but several years ago, when a couple of the women who worked with me were pregnant, they had asked, “Would you consider it?” We have worked together already for twelve years. I said, “Let’s try it for six months. I’ll keep the office for the next six months. We’ll see how it goes, but if it works well, we’ll do it.” We’ve been virtual for a few years. Things changed between an election, #BlackLivesMatter, more diversity focused, #MeToo, and all the different things that happened in the last several months that came much more to the forefront, those three being very big issues. Crisis management went up. Companies are thinking, “Before I say this.” If you want to go out and you want to talk about, “I’m pro women or I’m pro diversity, what does your board look like? What does your management team look like? Before you whip off a comment like that, just look at yourself.” 

I’ve had a lot of people who we’ve talked about the boards. When you look around, everybody looks pretty much the same. You get the answers. There’s a lot of misconceptions out there of who would make a good board member in some ways. Sometimes they think they want all old CEOs who’ve done it in the past, but then you’re leaving out so much. As you were talking about misconceptions, you write about some of those misconceptions. You touch on a lot of things on your blog and in different things that you do. What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about people over 50? 

 

It would zoom in on the first blog post I wrote. Only we can make ourselves irrelevant. If we believe we are irrelevant or obsolete or no longer valid to play the game, then we are. If we believe otherwise, there will always be someone ready to listen. I’m busier now at 60 than when I was at 40 and when I was at 24. I’m busier now than ever. It’s about making sure you’re nurturing all your relationships. If you want to let your relationships fall off the map, then they will. 

It’s a time where you can make the rules a little bit more. You’re in everybody else’s mercy when you’re younger, either you’ve got kids and you’re taking care of them. There’s always somebody to be taken care of. They always call the Gen X, the sandwich generation, but Boomers are too. A lot of us have our parents still. We’ve got that to take care of. When you talk about living agelessly, what do you mean by that? Is 50 the new 30? 

When I hear that, I’m like, “Let’s not say that, 50 is not the new 30, 40 is not the new 20, 50 is 50, and 40 is 40.” I’m 60, and 60 is 60. Here’s where I view it. Many times, we go through life and we say, “Fifty is the middle.” I don’t know too many 100-year-olds, and I don’t know too many 100-year-olds that I would want to emulate. My mother’s 92. If she keeps up the way she’s going, she could be the 100-year-old I want to be like because she still carries 10-pound mulch bags, five of them, to mulch her garden. To me, it gets down to that idea of embrace who you are, own it, be it, and know that you want to be healthy for the long haul. 

You want to be healthy in your body, your mind, your spirit, your enthusiasm for living, what you love. To me, that’s what it’s all about. That’s what Silver Disobedience is. Own it, take responsibility for it, go for it and say, “This is the life I want to live and I’m going for it.” There’s no time that you can’t do it. There are plenty of examples of entrepreneurs or people that are older, that are doing all kinds of things. Becoming that yoga instructor instead of taking the class and getting certified to do that. I know guys that worked in corporate offices, but always loved tinkering around their house with wood or being a plumber or construction. Now, they’re retired from their corporate jobs and those are their new businesses. 

You get out of the golden handcuffs and you go, “Now what can I do?” It is a good feeling. I would like to see a lot more options for over 50. My husband’s going to be 67 soon. I was looking at some of the stuff that he has coming in, the what you can do stuff. I was hoping to see better stuff. They do some AARP commercials, and they’ve got a boring guy hitting drums saying, “Come out and we’ll do some Indian drums and things out in the reservation area here in Arizona.” It could have been a cool thing to do, but they made it so boring. I’m thinking, “You need to make this a little hipper.” Do you think that we have the aim a little too low to appeal to people? Do we make over 50 act like what over 50 was when we were kids, when it’s now it’s not like that so much anymore? 

If I go back a few years, things are changing rapidly with the cool brains. When I would go on set, first of all, as a model, I’ll get cast as anything from the bride to the mother of the bride to the grandmother, depending on what the campaign is. I could have twenty-year-old children in the campaign. I could have 50-year-old children in the campaign, yet I’m 60 in real life. It can vary. When I started a few years ago, I would get dressed in things. When you’re a model, your job is whatever the brand is trying to sell, because there are all kinds of clothes out there and everyone wears them. Your job is to make that feel like you’re in the outfit that deserves to be on a yacht in Monte Carlo regardless of what it is. 

The fashion and styles are changing rapidly. The companies that were stuck in that frumpier look are struggling. Lancôme Paris brought me in for two campaigns that were filmed in 2020 in Barcelona and Paris. They were exquisite. They were honoring women aging. I couldn’t believe the investments they made into that. Estee Lauder’s doing that. There are brands out there that are saying, “This is my audience. These are my women. I love them. Let’s show the world how great we can all look.” 

Do you see that with clothing lines as well? I’ve seen it more with makeup than I have with clothing. 

It’s interesting with clothing lines. It varies. The super fitted stuff, I see less of that. Clothes for a lot of people are a lot more flowy. It depends, but there’s more personality going into clothes. We are in an age where the comfort of clothing, whether that flowiness is because they think older women all want more flowy clothes or if it’s more because of the comfort of, “I don’t need to have everything skintight on my body. I can be who I am regardless and know what my body is like underneath it.” 

My mom complained so much about the clothes for her age. She tends to like this sparkly, Vegasy stuff. Everything’s black with some sparkle to it. They don’t make a lot of that for older women. They have one store here. I walked in and I thought, “My mom needs to live here.” Everything in it was that way. They’ve got Chico’s and different brands and stuff that hit on that age group but it seems like it’s a challenging thing when I talk to women at a certain age. Have you found that you’re wearing anything different? For me, I look at all the clothes like, “I used to wear that. I wish I could still wear that.” It would fit me, but nobody wants to see me probably wearing it. Is it hard for you to decide? You’re very glamorous with your long hair and a lot of people used to cut their hair at our age and say, “You can’t wear your hair long.” Do you think that there are clothes you shouldn’t wear or hairstyles you shouldn’t have? Do you think it doesn’t matter now like it used to? 

You have to be comfortable. If anything’s happening in fashion is there are a lot of cool designers from small ones to super big ones. You need to find your comfort level because fashion is not just because you can buy it. It’s, “Am I comfortable when I wear it?” That’s the difference. The clothes don’t make you. You make the clothes. It’s funny you mentioned Chico’s. A few months back, I did a Chico’s campaign. When they first reached out to me because they wanted me to create social media content. I wrote this in my blog, and they signed off on it. I wrote, “Chico’s, you’re kidding me. I have to do a campaign about old lady clothes.” I mentioned this to a girlfriend. This is what I wrote my blog because this is God’s honest truth. Two of my girlfriends are like, “Are you crazy? Have you gone to Chico’s lately? Their clothes are so cool.” I have this black silk shirt from them. I could wear it seven days a week. It is cool. 

[bctt tweet=”We’re all on our own journey; focus on yourself in the most positive sense of the word. ” via=”no”]

There’s a perception though of certain things. They need spokespeople who are hipper sometimes to make it seem hipper. You can be a certain age and make things seem cool. How do you get to be a spokesperson? A lot of people have asked me that. Gilda and I have talked about that on some of her media talks. Do you have to be stunningly beautiful and have Wilhelmina behind you? I’m curious, for somebody who’s reading that they’ve their whole goal in life was to be a spokesperson, what would you tell them to do? 

Number one, start using the brand. Use the brand, talk about the brand, be positive about the brand and context the brand. A lot of people want to get discovered. There are a lot of people who want that. You need to reach out. You have to be willing to take the risk and say, “I love your products. They’re fantastic.” I’ve done a variety of campaigns with Hair Biology. It’s not just because I have a silver hair or more like white hair. I’ve had every hair company reach out to me, especially those that we’re good at getting out of your hair, but they happen to make a super product. Those are the kinds of things, but you need to be willing to put yourself out there on the line and say, “I’d love to work with you.” 

Had you done any modeling before Wilhelmina? 

Back when I was in my twenties, I worked in a few foreign films, but never did any modeling. Right before Wilhelmina, my son was skateboarding and a casting agent, Alina Zakaite, now she’s Alina Mulvey, after the day of my son’s casting and after he got the Old Navy commercial, she kept calling me to do different things. I kept getting them. She probably put me in ten national campaigns. From meeting all the makeup artists, the lighting people, the photographer, the stylist and talking to them all, it was a makeup artist that created the intro to Wilhelmina. A woman named Jessica Tarazi, who was fantastic. I couldn’t believe she made the intro. 

Do they have a need for older models to be as skinny and in shape? Do you have a certain routine you have to do to stay fit, or were you always that way? I remember I had a modeling agency talk to me when I was seventeen. I’m 5’8, and at that time I was maybe 113 pounds. I was skinny. They told me I needed to lose weight. I remember that. I thought, “For 5’8”, that was pretty thin.” Is there still that pressure or has that gone away? 

First of all, there are models of all shapes and sizes. Even at Wilhelmina, they’ve got a curve division. There’s an acknowledgment that women come in all shapes and sizes. On the board I’m on, I’m expected to show up in good shape. That doesn’t necessarily mean skinny. That means showing that if I’m standing all day long and I have to move around and I have to showcase clothes, and I’m wearing twenty different outfits during the day, and each picture needs to be as if it’s my first shot at the morning, you better make sure you’re taking care of yourself or you don’t have the energy. The best thing that modeling has done for me is it keeps me in check because you often don’t get your schedule for certain things until maybe the night before. Something’s happening, but you don’t know what. If you’re planning on going out and drinking a bunch of wine, you’re going to look crap the next day. There’s no amount of makeup that’s going to resolve an alcohol bloat or too much salt from food. 

You’re fit. 

I make sure I’m walking every time I can. It’s one of the principles in my book TurboCharged, which is every two hours, I do one minute of a body resistance exercise. 

That’s a good idea to get up and move around. I’ll sit at my desk and ten hours will go by sometimes and I’ll think, “I wish I’ve gotten up.” I tend to multitask my exercise with what I’m doing. If I’m on the exercise bike, I’m also on the phone, which is probably not a good thing to do. 

There’s nothing wrong with that as long as you’re moving. 

That’s important. My sister wanted to be a model, but she’s almost 6’3”. She was too tall to be a model. Are you in that tall range? Is there a range anymore? The clothes won’t fit her. They couldn’t do it. 

You have a call card, and on it it’s got your height, your weight and your sizes. One of the most important things in that world is you don’t want to show up for a shoot not what your sizes say. 

They’ve changed so much of everything. When I was young, they used to have all this modeling agency. I put my kids through this cute thing when they were little. I have two daughters and they had this Sincerely, Sandra, I remember. It was all how to walk on a runway and which forks to use. It was all to solve the mismanners. They loved it. It was so cute. They had this little runway at the end where they show their little outfits. It wasn’t where they had to get all made up with fancy makeup for a little kid and too much stuff. It was just enough that they learned manners. I thought it was a good thing for confidence. Did you do anything like that with your kids? 

I didn’t do it with my kids, but it was interesting when Wilhelmina signed me that my agent Ginny Conquest said, “Dian, the funny thing with you is going to be because of your age and your look. People are going to assume you’ve been modeling forever. We need to teach you how to move and what you need to do.” They had some of the models like Andressa Costa, who’s phenomenal and Pat Tracey, both of whom have been top in-demand models since they were fifteen came in and started to teach me. They would say, “I’m going to move this way, you move this way. This is what a step and repeat is. This is what somebody wants to see when they say work the box.” 

My sister did all that modeling here in town. I noticed it when she walks sometimes. She has a certain air that she keeps that she learned from that. It’s a good thing. It gives you a sense of confidence. I like that. I was looking at some of the stuff you did. You’ve got two companies. You have the DGI. What is DGIComm.com? 

That is a public relations firm where we work with all kinds of companies that are looking for media placements or strategic advice. 

Do you set people up with influencers? I’m curious where influencers fit in with all this. 

That’s a whole other thing. That’s more into the Silver Disobedience. I might be creating content for companies and running it through my Silver Disobedience platform because the website gets about a million visitors a month. My social media page has reached probably at least another million a week. 

 

How did you get to that level? It takes a lot of effort to get all of this content. Who helped you with this? Did you have to hire help for website creation and different things? Are you working with somebody else? How did this all come to be? 

I did hire someone who’s fantastic to build my website, but the biggest reason the community grew is from day one, I felt if I was going to write something and someone was going to take the time to respond, I read every comment and I respond to them all. I give somebody a thumbs up, but if someone’s written something that I know is intimate and they’ve posted it there, I’m not giving that a thumbs up. I’m giving them a thoughtful answer. I’m either responding to it in detail or I’ll say, “You triggered my thoughts here. I don’t want to be flipped about what you mentioned. I’m going to write a blog post, give me a week to think about this.” 

What’s your demographic? 

On Instagram, it’s 91% women, primarily in the 35 and up age group, with the majority being 40 to 65. On Facebook it is about 70% women 30% men. 

You also got quite a bit on Twitter and a lot on LinkedIn as well. Is there an untapped market that you’re trying to reach with the men or are you mostly focused on women? 

I’m not focused on anyone. I look at it this way. Everyone’s welcome to join the conversation. The majority of my followers on LinkedIn are men, because over the years I worked with a lot of men. Surprisingly many of those men, as I told you I was worried they’d all think I was having a midlife, most of my clients and people I’ve worked with over several years say, “I read your column. I don’t always comment, but I want you to know, I read what you say every day. I liked it.” I have no idea who those people are. I’ve got about 10,000 people. I’ve had it audited numerous times. They’re all real. I don’t know who they are because they never seem to comment or engaged. I have no clue what’s going on. The other ones I understand well. 

Have you been into TikTok or Clubhouse or any of those yet? 

I did join Clubhouse. I will test out Clubhouse, but I’m probably going to start doing some more Instagram lives in 2021. It’s something I have not done, but my audience keeps asking me to. I started doing Reels, which is fun. I have Reels that have now been seen 40,000-plus times, which shocks me. I’m like, “That’s a nice number.” 

What was the topic on there? 

I did a step-by-step on how I keep my hair white, which people kept asking me. I did my reveal. 

How do you keep your hair white? 

I use a lot of Hair Biology products. They’re conditioning products. 

Your hair is all white naturally or do you have to dye it that color? 

It’s how it’s grown in. 

You have a beautiful hair color. My family doesn’t go gray. It would almost be so much easier because that’s almost my color. Mine has to be colored almost light white to get what I want. Did you have blonde? What color hair did you have? 

I had a honey brown for many years. I started covering my hair when I was probably in 12th grade in high school. It’s been every color under the sun from purple to blue to black. I know almost immediately after September 11th, when I went to go get my hair colored, the colorist said, “You’ve gone silver overnight.” I was right about 41, 42. 

Everybody had to find out what their real hair color was this 2021. It was a tough year. I would imagine it would be so freeing to have your natural color and not to have to mess with it, especially such a pretty color. I was looking at so much that you wrote about and I thought it was an interesting site. I could see how you’re touching on such positive things. It’s such in a hip way. Are these pictures on your site all from Wilhelmina? You said you had to post pictures. Are these part of that? 

Wilhelmina has a different set of pictures. On my Instagram, because every time you go to a shoot, just like an actor or an actress now, they want to know, “If we cast you, how are you going to help us promote?” There’s a lot of testing. Someone will say, “What’s your Instagram. How many people might recognize you?” 

As with all the authors, the first word they ask you is, “What’s your platform.” You have quite a platform and I could see why. I was excited to talk to you because I love that you deal with perception and a lot of the same issues that fascinate me. I thought a lot of people could learn a lot from you. I know your work is in chapters in books that are in Harvard and all these great places. Inspirational backstory on all the stuff you’ve done. If somebody wanted to find you or learn more, you’re on all these sites, but how do they find you? 

Either of my websites, DianGriesel.com or SilverDisobedience.rocks. 

It’s fun to have you on the show, Dian. Thank you so much. I loved your site. You’re hitting a note for so many people. You have a great platform. I was noticing how many people followed you. I’d like to see more. I hope you start an over 50 TV show or something on your site or a whole network. It was fun to meet you. Thank you so much for being on the show. 

It was my honor. You are special. I have to interview you. 

That’ll be fun. Thank you. 

—

I’d like to thank Dian for being my guest. We get so many great guests on the show. If you’ve missed any past episodes, you can go to DrDianeHamilton.com. I hope you take some time to check out the site. You can get some more information on taking the Curiosity Code Index or the Perception Power Index. It’s all there on the site. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you join us for the next episode of Take The Lead Radio. 

Important links: 

• The Silver Disobedience Playbook 
• TurboCharged 
• DGIComm.com 
• Instagram – Silver Disobedience 
• Facebook – Silver Disobedience 
• Twitter – Silver Disobedience 
• LinkedIn – Dian Griesel 
• DianGriesel.com 
• SilverDisobedience.rocks 

About  Dr. Dian Griesel 

Dian Griesel, Ph.D. is a perception analyst, nutritionist, best-selling author, creative KOL, and the founder & president of Dian Griesel lnt’l. (DGI) and Silver Disobedience Inc., both 100% wholly-owned small corporate communications businesses. Over 400 CEOs of publicly traded companies plus boards and other high-level executives and individuals have hired Dian to serve as their strategic advisor and confidante because of her keen intuition and awareness of how written, verbal, visual, and body language communication trigger opinions, act ion s and response in all types of interactions – including corporate branding, advertising, marketing, and personal impact. For 25 years and counting, Dian’s advisory consulting has included crisis management, marketing strategies, and best-practice quality story-telling content within FDA, FTC, SEC, DoD, and other regulated environments.

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